by Payson Schwin, Nov 22, 2007

Today is a good day to remember the nearly 700 nurses walking picket lines at Appalachian Regional Healthcare (ARH) hospitals who won’t have the luxury of a well-stocked table.

So, before we O.D. on turkey taters or other turkey-laced addendums, let’s take a minute to help out these brave nurses this Thanksgiving. Click here to donate $25—the cost of a Thanksgiving meal—to the ARH nurses’ strike fund.

The members of the United American Nurses (UAN) union have been on strike in Kentucky and West Virginia since Oct. 1. They’re seeking a contract with safer staffing levels and higher patient care standards. The nurses are concerned that management’s staffing decisions and rampant mandatory overtime are preventing them from giving patients the best possible care. In contract negotiations, ARH proposed modest pay raises while demanding to cut holiday pay and increase health care premiums, effectively wiping out the raises.  

For exercising their freedom to assemble on the picket lines, the nurses say they have been spied on by security guards hired by the company. Nurses also report they have been victims of vandalism away from the picket line. Many nurses are having difficulty paying their utility bills—never mind finding the cash to buy their kids gifts this season.

Sonya England, a registered nurse at Middlesboro ARH Hospital in Kentucky, says life on the picket line is tough.

We have tents for sleeping, tents for eating, tents for gathering together for conversation. We do have to deal a lot with passers-by throwing bottles, yelling obscenities at us, telling us to get back to work. But we stay out there, we maintain, we hold, because we know the reasons we’re out there are right. We’re out there for safe patient care.

And another nurse’s story, via the Associated Press:

Jerry Blevins has stood for weeks on a picket line with his fellow nurses, thinking about his mortgage, his tearful wife, his four children.[…]

“I am willing to do what it takes,” Blevins said recently while bottle-feeding his baby boy on the picket line.

The nurses have the strong support of the nation’s union movement, including the United Steelworkers (USW), whose 2,700 members at ARH hospitals walked out for three weeks in the spring, and the Mine Workers. Decades ago, Mine Workers President John L. Lewis established the hospitals in the impoverished region to aid mine workers and their families—making ARH’s vicious union-busting tactics an even bigger slap in the face to the nation’s workers. 

The AFL-CIO Community Services Network has donated tens of thousands of dollars to support the strikers, AFSCME has pitched in $10,000 and other unions and their members are supporting the nurses as well. But they still need our help.

Let’s continue to help these brave workers in their hour of need.

Click here to make a secure donation today.

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